Tuesday, September 24, 2019

San Francisco Attorney Dismas Hardy Takes on a Complicated Case in This Novel from John Lescroart

This is a fairly decent entry in John Lescroart's long-running series featuring San Francisco defense attorney Dismas Hardy and the cast of characters that has grown up around him through the years. Hardy has aged through the books, and is recovering from a couple of gunshot wounds that he suffered on his last case. He's contemplating retirement but then a former client, Abby Jarvis, is charged with poisoning her boss, Grant Wagner, the owner of a successful family business. Dismas feels compelled to take Abby's case, at least initially, even though the cops and the D.A. seem to think that they have an iron-clad case against her.

The early books in this series are among my favorite legal thrillers of all. They are smart, witty, and hugely suspenseful. This book, though, is much more of a police procedural and there are relatively few courtroom scenes. The plot at once seems both thin and convoluted and didn't have the sense of urgency that so many of the earlier books did. And, I confess, I'm growing a bit tired of Hardy's children who are now young adults and who seem to keep blundering into these novels in ways that don't make a lot of sense to me. Hardy's wife, Frannie, is also something of a pain in this outing.

Hardy will persevere and attempt to sort through all the complicated issues that this case presents, while at the same time attempting to deal with the family drama that results. I enjoyed the book, but couldn't help comparing it to the earlier books in the series that got my blood pumping a lot more than this one did.

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